PREFACE. This book is specially designed to supply the needs of pupils who must work with simple appliances at ordinary school desks, and under the supervision of a teacher who can devote but little time to the subject. But it is believed that it will be equally useful to those who have the advan- tages of a well-equipped laboratory and the aid of a special teacher. An attempt has been made to lay out the work from day to day, so that the teacher, burdened with other duties, need have little to do in the way of preparing outlines of the daily work. It is expected that the pupils, not the teacher, will provide all the material used. Each exercise directs work easy enough to be profitable to the weakest pupil in the higher grammar grades, and at the same time suggests problems which will try the power of the brightest pupil in the last year of the high school. The object ofthe exercises is chiefly to teach how to study plants, not to give information about them. A few facts are given for the purpose of encouraging pupils to look for more of the same kind, and, at the same time, furnishing material for the important work of verifying the discoveries of others, by repeating the observations or experiments which revealed them. President Jordan says, To verify the fact gives training to discover it gives inspiration. Training and inspiration, not the facts themselves, are the justification of science-teaching. The ability to get facts and to use them, not the number of facts acquired, is the true measure of education. The value of observed facts to the student, like the use of minnows to the fisherman, is that, if skillfully handled, they enable him to get larger facts. It is this exer- cise ofhandling facts that strengthens the mind, that truly educates. As the activity of muscles and mind is worth more to the hunter than the game he brings down, so the exercise of observing facts and deducing truths from them is more valuable to the student than the knowledge gained, or, as President Jordan puts it, To seekknowledge is better than to have knowledge. The wise teacher does not, in giving an educational test, direct the student to write out what he has read but says to him, Go to-day into the library, the laboratory, or the fields and find facts to-morrow tell me what they mean. The questions in this book are designed to draw atten- tion to facts that might otherwise be overlooked to stimu- late thought and to lead in the direction of truth. They are not test questions. It is not expected that pupils can at once answer many of them, nor is it supposed that any pupil can, even at the close of the course in botany, answer perfectly all of them. The teacher should never answer any of the questions. They are for the use of the pupil. He should, however, help the class to weigh the evidence presented by pupils in defense of their answers. As a presiding judge he should point out errors in statements of facts and weak points in arguments. The questions must . be decided, if at all, by evidence, not by authority. It must be remembered that queries have the most educational value to one who reasons out the answers from facts which he himselfhas discovered. Once more quoting the highest authority on science-teaching teaching as a part of general education is this to train the judgment through its exercise on first-hand knowledge. Since in most schools botany is taken up soon after the winter holidays, the first exercises are devoted to seeds and nr The purpose of science - their germination. If the work is begun in August or September, flowers, fruits, and leaves should be studied first, then seeds and winter buds...